How to Live and Make a Living: Education’s Dual Mission

There are few things we believe in as fervently as education. At one level, it’s about trying to get hold of some practical skills, for example in Chemistry, Business, Law, or Public Health. But the deeper claims one hears on behalf of education, the sort one reads of in prospectuses and hears about in graduation ceremonies, imply quite rightly that colleges and universities are more than merely machines for turning out business people and scientists. They have a yet higher task to fulfill: to mold us into better, wiser, and happier people— and that’s why education is both such a practical and profound process.

As John Stuart Mill, a great 19th century defender of the aims of education, put it: “The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.” Or, to listen to the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, a proper education should inspire in us: “a love of our neighbor, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human misery. At its most ambitious,” he added, “it should engender nothing less than the ‘noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it.’”

We have sensibly charged our higher-education system with a dual mission: to teach us how to make a living, and to teach us how to live.

We have sensibly charged our higher-education system with a dual mission: to teach us how to make a living, and to teach us how to live. Ultimately, the purpose of all education is to save us time and spare us errors. It is a mechanism whereby society attempts reliably to inculcate in its members, within a set span of years, what it took the very brightest and most determined of their ancestors centuries of painful and sporadic efforts to work out.

A university student enrolled today on a physics degree will in a matter of months be able to learn as much as Faraday ever knew, and within a couple of years may be pushing at the outer limits of Einstein’s unified field theory. And likewise, a three-year course in the humanities will open our hearts to experiences it would take any one of us thousands of years to accumulate on our own.

The promise of education is that we will, thanks to its many lessons, get to the truth just a little faster and make at least one or two fewer mistakes than the previous generation.